In the Footsteps of the "Last Samurai"

As Tom Cruise publicly noted about his film The Last Samurai, it was not the character he portrayed, Nathan Algren, who was the true hero of the story, but rather the samurai he'd come to admire—his captor, Katsumoto, played by Ken Watanabe. The character Katsumoto was based on an enigmatic man from Kagoshima named Saigo Takamori, a central figure in the effort to restore the Emperor, who turned away when he felt betrayed by his cause. A physically and mentally imposing man influenced strongly by the conscience-honing philosophies of Confucianism and Zen, Takamori understood that dramatic changes would be necessary to ensure the success of Japan's transition from feudal state to modern society. Among them was the need for a trained, tested, and respected army. To further this end, he devised a scheme to provoke a war with the "hermit kingdom" of Korea. So audacious was his plan—it involved his own sacrifice to bring it off—that although it gained a high degree of secret support unknown to him, officially he was rebuked for it. He withdrew to the hills to school a band of disgruntled out-of-work samurai into making a last stand for a dying lifestyle, a movement that evolved into the historic Satsuma Rebellion. With the unlikely exception of the character of Algren, the movie provided the fairly accurate basis of events. Key battles were in Kumamoto—in that castle's long history, it was Takamori that led the only successful siege—and Kagoshima, where it all came to a dreadful end in late 1877.